Spring Break in Omaha



College roommates on spring break launched from Missoula toward Lauderdale in a rusted-out Chevrolet Vegas on its final voyage. They stopped to spend the night with Jack Daniels, their mutual friend, on a rooftop apartment in Omaha. They gobbled a quart baggie of mushrooms and transformed into Marlin Perkins and Gentleman Jim for a new age, tagging and bagging prey. They started small by building a spider restaurant out of Popsicle sticks and marshmallow webbing, the ant Bolognese with caterpillar capers in serious need of salt and verve.

Maybe the next bite would be better. But no, it too tasted of shaving cream, formic acid, and cottonmouth plaque. A beer run was needed, according to the ass-taste on the palate and the constellations in the pirouetting sky: Epops Anus (the Asshole Hoopoe), Aloysius Primus (the First Snuffleupagus), and all of the limbs of the Celestial Kinkajou. And witness the rising of Neptune in Tunis, that coy little minx, coaxing the men with her palm-frond tranny eyelashes. Wiedemann's and women, in that order, then, right after finding their fingers and wallets.

The trip to the quickie mart was epic in the way of all boys leaving home, with each stuffing a malt liquor down their pants so the spigot-eye poked Cyclopean from them, and coeds giggled as they quested into a roller rink where armored mavens blew kisses and elbowed each other into the audience, but the young men refused to wrest their future brides from electric pikes. At dawn, they ended up circling the cornfields in their sputtering Vegas, dodging scarecrow sirens and offroading to create crop circles that would draw alien babes to impregnate before the vortex swallowed them off.

But after the gyrations and waterspouts, when noon came, the Nebraska sun parching the bags under their eyes like the cuticles of a farmhand, it was time to head back downtown, to The Meatpacking Plant, where hefty blond ferrymen's daughters wrestled in cornhusker's lotion for brunch money, to Spiro's Cafe for the Henry Fonda special, an edible razor strap of tri-tip and feta. As they ate, ratty and ravenous, covered in seed and stinking of gasoline, nobody asked their names or destination. Every resident they met seemed to assume the mid-continental gravity kept them shelved along with the other mobile knick-knacks.

They waited until two farmgirls on their way to the butchery plucked them from the bench outside a smoke shop where they'd slept with a wooden bust of Ernest Hemingway spraypainted with cherry lipstick and tramp stamps. They confessed their boys gone wild adventure to the muscular debutantes, showered and devoured eggs and gravy with their foreheads stroked, woke up thirty years later with wives at a Super Bowl party repackaging exploits of their spring trip adventure to children bred from corn hair lust and lizard dreams propelled by car shells, and an urge for rooting through the earth to balmy seas unabated.

 

 

 

 

 


apocryphaltext Vol. 4

Raised in Michigan but now living in Southern California, John F. Buckley and Martin Ott began their ongoing games of poetic volleyball in 2009. Poetry from their collaboration Poets' Guide to America has been accepted by the Bryant Literary Review, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Compass Rose, Conceit Magazine, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut River Review, Eleven Eleven, Splash of Red, and Untamed Ink.

 

 

a poem by john f. buckley
and martin ott